People usually say that Gold and Silver didn't include some Kanto locations like Cerulean Cave, Seafoam Islands, Viridian Forest and the Safari Zone, because there wasn't any space left on the cartridge. But is this really true? Or was there more space left (after Iwata decompressed the game) but the devs just believed a smaller Kanto was more suitable as a postgame for Gold and Silver?

Furthermore, wasn't Crystal on a bigger capacity cartridge than Gold/Silver? They could've added the missing Kanto locations in Crystal, but they didn't. This makes me think that the devs just didn't want to expand Kanto further.

Can someone explain the truth behind GSC to me?

johto sucks